adderaline

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

corporate governance structures are anti-democratic by nature. framing corporate capture of innovation, economic opportunity, scientific research, and our most critical services as a positive thing is grotesque. nobody should own lifesaving research. nobody should own our houses, our hospitals, our livelihoods and our parks, corporations shouldn’t be able to decide what causes are worthy, what challenges can be addressed. we should. the people who do the work, who make the products, who do the labor that serves others, not unaccountable boards of ultra-wealthy assholes who think they get to make our decisions for us, and are using that power to actively kill the fucking planet.

if you wanna lick the boot, have fun with that corpo.

“idealism” is a funny way of saying “opposition to war”. you are making excuses for a country raining death on a civilian population. you are drawing a line in the sand, saying that we cannot have a better world than this, and actively defending an organization that is killing children. war is the problem i want to solve, and your “solution” doesn’t solve that problem.

the world is not “wretched”, it does not “work” in some predefined way you expect it to. you have just decided not to advocate for a worthy cause, because it falls outside the bounds of what you have arbitrarily decided it is possible for the world to be, even as larger and larger groups of people fight to obtain that which you call a “fantasy”. there is no use in accepting the world as it is, in presuming that things cannot change for the better. we can’t know if its impossible without trying, again and again, as many times as it takes. progress was never made by accepting the status quo. it was never made by limiting the scope of our ambition.

stop speaking as though deflecting blame from the IDF, deflecting responsibility onto a terrorist organization, and making excuses for why a famine should continue are the “realistic” outer bounds of what we can do. the world you say you want doesn’t come about by aligning yourself with forces that are currently driving war, injustice, and suffering in Gaza. it doesn’t come about by abdicating the IDF of the responsibility of the war crimes you admit its soldiers are committing. you are seeing the alternative, you are seeing a principled opposition to war unfolding around you, and deciding that it is unobtainable, deciding that it foolish, and aligning yourself with the war-makers.

I will not do the same. I recognize the history of anti-war movements, the ways in which they have failed to achieve their goals. I do not have delusions that war is easy to kill. I just don’t have the arrogance to assume I know what the outcome will be. Even if we fail to create a world without suffering, at least I can know that we tried. Free Palestine.

you’re constantly trying to frame opposition to Israel as a failure to understand. i’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. we understand the conflict. we understand the players. we understand that Hamas is a far-right organization, and would do harm if they were to come to greater power. we just don’t think that justifies the kinds of violence being leveled at the Palestinian people. i’m not pro-Palestine because i don’t understand the stakes, because i’m blindly following the underdog. i’m doing it because i object to the death of innocent people, because i oppose war, apartheid, displacement, and destruction in all its forms.

again, deflecting blame. it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter what “every single nation on Earth” would have done (although I think there’s plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn’t even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i’ve heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel’s actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don’t want to die of starvation. i don’t want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

whose rockets have been raining down on whose homes? the appeal of a potential future threat to Israeli lives outweighing the current, present threat towards magnitudes more Palestinian lives is played out. people here aren’t ride or die for Hamas, they just acknowledge that leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing them from getting food is both not likely to lead to less rockets on Israeli homes, and is in itself an act of genocide. when did appeals to not killing innocent Palestinians become support for Hamas to you? when did persistent, unending violence against the Palestinian people become “self-defence”?

this is not “think of the children”. its “tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government”. we aren’t appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i’m sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don’t get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they’re using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a “master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it”, if you’re genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.

no, its to achieve your goals. this is fundamental to the idea of direct action. you’re doing stuff. you aren’t trying to build support for helping homeless people, you’re going out there and feeding them. you aren’t waiting for people to legalize desegregation, you’re defying segregated public space. you aren’t begging public officials not to build an oil pipeline in your home, you’re chaining yourself to equipment.

if you confine protesting only to convincing bystanders to be on your side, you’re just saying the only way to win a just future is to be popular. what consolation is that to the marginalized? to those who have never enjoyed widespread public support, and can’t expect it to solve their problems?

if you think protests are only to alter public opinion? you don’t know very much about protesting. direct action has been part of protests since the beginning.

i’m not really seeing any claim that “any protest anywhere is just as valid”. they’re talking about educating people on the strategic value of civil disobedience and direct action. that is important for any social movement that wants to succeed.

Blocking random roads does nothing but turn people who just want to get to work against you.

this isn’t true. it can turn people against you, for sure. that isn’t the only thing it does though. it can delay the construction of an oil pipeline. it can disrupt the logistics of an industry. like, the activist’s dilemma is important, taking care to recognize the PR of what you do is important, but direct action is about doing the thing you want done, rather than waiting for public opinion to turn.

if you are an indigenous activist trying to keep an oil pipeline from poisoning your water, or the government from leasing your land to corporate agriculture, it doesn’t matter if people are “on your side” or not. you need to stop the fully legal process that is guaranteed to make your people suffer, knowing that nobody but you and your people are historically likely to defend your home. there are so many situations where just waiting for public opinion to turn isn’t gonna stop the thing you want to stop.

i’m sorry, but you really aren’t in a position to be saying anything about how effective these strategies are. direct action continues to be a huge part of basically every modern social movement up to and including the largest protests in history. if you aren’t open to learning those reasons, you have no grounds to contest their efficacy.

they’re kinda right though. the things this person is saying aren’t new. the principles of direct action were instrumental in the success of the Civil rights movement, and many other activist movements throughout modern history. i’m really not sure where you think this person is coming from, though, with the whole “spoon-fed hate” thing. they’re a leftist. a socialist or an anarchist, something of that flavor. the action they’re demanding is action against climate change, against bigotry, against capitalism. or at least, i don’t really see many people who aren’t somewhere around that headspace talking about “praxis” and “direct action”. they kinda come off like a smartass to me, but the point they’re getting to is something pretty fundamental to organizing effective movements, and they’re talking about it because tons of people aren’t aware of the theory and politics that has grown up around making changes in society.

like, just for history’s sake, in the SCLC, the org MLK lead during the civil rights movement, Selma, among many other things, was organized by James Luther Bevel, the SCLC’s Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education. he turned out to have sexually abused his daughters, so uhhh… not a great dude , but if you look at his wikipedia you can see how instrumental he was to the civil rights movement as it is known today, and how the idea of direct action was foundational to that movement and its success.

because not fighting means getting killed, being marginalized, getting the groundwater poisoned, losing rights, getting put into concentration camps, etc? its not complicated. lots of people don’t have the luxury to just not “bother”. they aren’t blocking roads cuz they like it, people who do direct action can get put in fucking prison. they’re doing it because they don’t have the choice to sit on the sidelines and whine about how annoying protests are.

like, for real, do you think the people who built the civil rights movement didn’t hold meetings on this exact thing? that they didn’t talk about blocking roads and airports? that they didn’t do sit-ins and other kinds of direct action? like, if you think this is stupid as fuck, you must think a great deal of the people who built and participated in the civil rights movement were pretty fucking stupid, because they were doing this shit, and it was against the law, and it was the law that broke first.

you sure are fun

Like JKR not being pro-trans is just her opinion. And as far as I know, she hasn’t gone on a crusade against anyone yet.

using a large public platform to disseminate the same kinds of anti-trans arguments currently being used by bigots to draft legislation putting trans people at risk is not just an opinion. like, it isn’t a crusade, but when there is a crusade going on and you’re saying the same thing the crusaders are saying, its not a good look.

do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.

Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.

maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.

i guess? we’re talking about copyleft licenses though. GDPR might be fuzzier because technically you don’t have an account with any instances your account is federated with (i assume), but AGPL is the license for the federated service itself. if they don’t provide their code, they are violating the terms of the license. that opens them up to litigation i think. i don’t know though, legal shit is very much not my wheelhouse.

doesn’t AGPL give some ability to verify? i’m pretty sure it stipulates that you have to distribute the code a network server is being run with. it would at least let people know if an instance has taken steps to keep data it shouldn’t be keeping.